We're Building Stasi 2.0

I wrote this in early November. A US District Court decision yesterday (Dec 16, 2013) found that parts of the NSA’s mass data gathering are unconstitutional. It’s a small victory but a step in the right direction. In light of this decision, this article takes on renewed importance.

Before the Edward Snowden story broke, I watched a movie about East Germany. It was set in the time when East Germany was a communist dictatorship walled off from the world, like a huge maximum-security prison. The Lives of Others is a gripping drama that shows what that life was like. To say it was dehumanizing, that there was no justice, that people lived in constant terror of the secret police—the Stasi—does not even begin to describe it. For example, the Stasi had forensic information on every typewriter in the country. They could find the author of anything they didn’t like, and disappear him.

See the movie. By the way, the lead actor was hated in East Germany after the movie came out. Even years after communism collapsed, many of its victims are so scarred that they would prefer to blank it out. This is testimony to how horrific it was.

I normally write about gold and economics, but Edward Snowden has brought to the attention of America—and the whole world—a different issue. We advocates of the gold standard are, at root, fighting for freedom. So we should pay attention to this front in the same battle. There are many similarities with the fight for a free market in money, the unadulterated gold standard.

One of them is that the old notions of “liberal” and “conservative” seem almost inapplicable. It used to be that “conservatives” in the U.S. were in favor of more freedom and less government, at least nominally. But today, that’s not necessarily so. Wall Street is generally “conservative” and they are for a central bank, and its endless acts of Quantitative Easing.

Similarly, Republicans and “conservatives” are now coming out in favor of the National Security Agency, and defending its spying on American citizens. They do this in the wake of pervasive abuses that Snowden has disclosed. The Stasi could never have dreamed of some of the capabilities used against every American every day by the NSA, such as mass scanning of emails and phone calls, much less automatically building a list of contacts for each citizen or tracking everyone’s whereabouts in realtime.

Support for the NSA fits with conservatives’ strong support for “homeland security”. This term has been completely perverted, in a way that would make George Orwell proud. It is now about subjecting citizen-serfs to every conceivable inconvenience and intrusion, especially when they dare to travel by airplane, talk on the phone, send an email, get health care, or pay taxes. Instead of protecting the rights of the people, security agencies now exist to attack them.

Those who would defend the security establishment and the nascent police state may be “conservative” but they are no friends of man’s rights or of freedom. Some are blind ideologues, others are ignorant dupes, and many are just profiteering government contractors. It doesn’t matter; they are defending the indefensible.

It is shocking that people who grew up in a free country would staunchly support “fundamentally transforming” America into tyranny. And that’s what it’s about, tyranny and ultimately murder. There is no other reason to build a surveillance machine capable of watching everyone constantly, a healthcare system in which government bureaucrats make every life or death decision, a tax agency that knows what you think and who you voted for—and a militarized police force.

It’s a good thing that information disclosed by Edward Snowden has roiled the American electorate. He just may have gotten through to people with a wake-up call. I hope it is in time to change course.

The fight against surveillance, censorship, and pseudo-security has another similarity with the fight against fiat currency. If we lose the battle, it’s lights out. Our civilization will collapse into a new Dark Age.

The fight for honest money is linked to the fight against the police state. A police state will destroy the productivity that still props up the debt that backs the dollar. Alternatively, a dollar collapse will drive desperate, hungry people into the streets. This would provide cover for a crackdown and dictatorship.

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It is all broken. If you think you live in liberty stop paying your real estate and property taxes. We turn our young men into girls in grade school and drug those that won't sit still into submission. By the time they are young "men" in high school they are shaving their chests and arms to keep the girls happy. We eliminate competition and in competitions everyone gets a medal or trophy because we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Our country is well and truly fu...ed. The world doesn't run on feelings. We have been turned into a herd of dairy cows to be milked. Ask a dairy farmer what happens to male dairy calves. That is the future of American males and thus the nation!!! Got milk?

Building a "Stasi" requires the ability of government to build a large and pervasive network of informants and to be able to create ideological criminals. The closet we have come to that is to criminalize "hate", which IMO is too far removed from government to be useful.

I think the "Stasi" analogy cannot succeed on many points not the least is that the East Germans didn't have the internet and didn't have a means of communication to oppose government run amok.

the large pervasive network can be machines instead of people.All that matters is that the surveillance is pervasive & it is.It doesn't need to be all human agents all the time so long as some humans are in charge of all those machines & the surveilled content.And they are.It can be a billion machines to one scanning human operator using various servers & algorithms but it's still there.then the remaining humans not employed as intelligence operators who are otherwise skilled can be deployed.As enforcers.And they are.

Your means to oppose your government are removed when you are removed & you can be at any time. It takes but one accusation that you are a terrorist, muslim, sovereign citizen & within minutes SWAT is bashing in your door, exploding your walls, walled off your entire neighborhood, searching every home even after they catch you & putting everyone in their obedient place - like Boston.

I don't think Feinstein is a sovialist or really even a liberal. I think she is a self serving psychopath, or perhaps only self serving and shrewd.

My point is nobody gets economic theory. Nobody really gets Keynesian or Marx or god help you von mises.

They are not furthering their ideology they are serving their own interests. Makes no difference who it is, the vast majority will just serve what they preveive to be their own interest. People with diferent interests put a label on them. But they have seldom if ever rally sought to understand the premise which they support. If you just accept that it will be a lot easier to communicate and find solutions than labelling an opposition whose interests are not the same as yours.

I can't wait until the TSA has guns and tasers. Like giving candy to retards.

I won't fly - the airlines can do without my money. Keep family close, to hell with "government security." If money were important, the unions would be raising bloody hell The silence is deafening from the airlines, and that tells everything one could ever need to know.

The court decision was NOT a victory ... it was a pre-planned step towards moving control of the data collection from out of the hands of the US government and into the hands of the Khazar, errr globalist, politburo.

The data is being collected from all over the planet - while the apparatus has been paid for by the US taxpayer. Now it will be moved into either some "independent" body (controlled by the global politburo) or openly delegated out to the telecoms providers (controlled by the global politburo). No more questions of constitutionality, congressional committees, or FOIA requests. They'll probably even deny it is even being centrally collected any more! Riiiiight.

'Edward Snowden' is a psyop to achieve this globalist objective of a GLOBAL STASI 2.0. Less than 1% of the alleged "stolen" data has been released in the past x months, and every single [redacted] document published has been with the approval of the US/UK governments. See anything odd about that?! How much more 'limited' could a limited hangout be?

That court victory you speak of was labeled as an opinion by the judge wasn't it? Ultimately any real court decision on the legality of it would go to the Supreme Court, wouldn't it? And with all the sunk costs in what is being done and with homeland security issues as rider considerations it's anybodies guess what they would decide.

The federal judge who made this prima facie opinion is a Jesuit. The Supreme Court comprises a majority of Jesuits and other Ashkenazis. 'Nuff said (for those who know the Khazar connection). I can easily guess where this will go. Anybody else can make their own guesses.

A poster that got banned for his amazing ability to take any subject, action, historical reference, physics, astronomy, or why dogs and cats fight, and then prove it was a Zionist conspiracy in his mind.

i am not here to represent f.s. but to say you have miss-characterized
him and he , apparently, can not represent himself in this
forum though there may be no way to know if that is his choice.
f.s. was a name of a dude from a movie with bill murray, i forget the
name of the movie. it was the one where f.s. is this strung out guy
from n.y., i think, and he doesn't want anyone to touch his stuff.
i can respect that.
i say if f.s. is incarcerated he should be freed immediately.
if he is being muzzled then muzzle me too and all the crazy zionists
and neocons and democrats and wall street liberal fascists! and the commies
and capitalist flesh eaters republicrat war money mongers feeding on human
death and flesh !!
.
learn about the snake people !
to william //......http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-12-18/holiday-tapers#comment-4...

The author of this article needs to understand that everything has been adulterated these days. Sure technology is producing some marvellous stuff but that too is adulterating our lives because both individuals and governments are using it in many instances in a manner that it was never meant to be used.

Whether it is our privacy, our food, our money, our savings, our education....everything is being trashed by the common denominator of profit rather than stability, sustainability and happiness.

Because humans are "collectors" they are faced with a tsunami that is headed their way but which they have not really noticed other than the shadow that is forming above them.

If only we could manage to achieve less but better quality "consumption" in all aspects of life, we would then have the time to reflect on how much better our lives are. We clutter our lives and the machine out there clutters it even more so as to bamboozle us, entertain us and to keep us in line.

When money was real, in gold or silver, man was far better at prioritising and making use of scarce resources. With fiat you can smother the human being's lungs, eyes, stomach and mind in next to no time.

It is already. Any legislative or judicial opposition has been carefully weeded out over years, if not decades. Each brick in this wall has been very carefully placed-unlike every previous tyranny in the 20th century which was hurredly rushed together in an avalanche of blood.

William, I have been doing a 2 question survey, presenting to perfect strangers, when I get the opurtunity, The last time I made it was in St Lukes hospital while doing some PAD test that took a few hrs and had three women ages 40-50.

My first question of the survey, "do you beleive that Lee H Oswald was the only person involved in the killing of JFK and the second question is "which are you more in fear of, a middle eastern terrorist or your government ?" All three women answered in kind, did not believe Oswald was a single operator and they feared there government much more than a terrorist. One actually declared "she has lost complete faith in her government".

These women were radilogy tech's, the one declaring she had lost complete faith was a Fox follower, the rest very apolitical. It appears that the government knows the poeple have lost complete faith in them, they must if they are listening in as Snowden describes and obviously fear the people they govern.

Most all do not understand how a coup occurred in the last days of Bush with the TBTF bailout, but most all now understand the basics of how it occurred and how the MSM is not to be trusted.

As far as myself, I hope Snowden does not fall for the amnesty ploy and releases the nformation that the NSA people fear. TPTB are all in fear of what he actually has, no wonder they would even consider an amnesty deal.

I read yesterday that Snowden gave all his info to the reporters who intend to release it in a series of soon-to-be-best-selling books.

See Siebel Edmonds.

She's asking Snowden to come forward and explain whether he has any problems with the reporter(s)' mega-deals with NSA-linked publishers/media moguls instead of an actual release of more than just 1% of the information for which he risked life and limb.

you're right about the coup-but the media just celebrated its 50th anniversary-11/22/63.

The 2008 event just made it public in case anybody was still wondering who's really in charge.

FWIW-if it's possible-the JFK assassination is still the ball of yarn from which tio start-too many people-too many loose ends-and each generation is still having to run around and spew dis-iformation.

you're right about the coup-but the media just celebrated its 50th anniversary-11/22/63.

The 2008 event just made it public in case anybody was still wondering who's really in charge.

FWIW-if it's possible-the JFK assassination is still the ball of yarn from which tio start-too many people-too many loose ends-and each generation is still having to run around and spew dis-iformation.

A capitalist head on a socialist body and that person chewing arms and legs off.

Capitalists are much scarcer, feed off others SOME BUT NOT ALL SURVIVE.

Socialist, already dead zombies, stagnation and death are all that await.

NOW LEGISLATE FOR THOSE THAT BECOME CAPITALISTS TO SURVIVE.

ON AN IDEOLOGICAL LEVEL WHY OBAMACARE WAS ALWAYS GOING TO FAIL. Wrong reason chosen, not for the good of the body, but the craving of greed in the capitalist head. Stuffed and not what you think it is now?

"Support for the NSA fits with conservatives’ strong support for “homeland security”."

I know Dianne Feinstein, she is no conservative ;-)

"This term has been completely perverted, in a way that would make George Orwell proud."

Certainly, but perverted by whom?

"It is now about subjecting citizen-serfs to every conceivable inconvenience and intrusion, especially when they dare to travel by airplane, talk on the phone, send an email, get health care, or pay taxes. Instead of protecting the rights of the people, security agencies now exist to attack them."

Agreed.

Entrusting the state with a security law that looks outward to not become Stasi-like was a mistake by conservatives, just as entrusting the state with a healthcare law that looks inward to not become Stasi-like is a mistake by "progressives".

nmewn, logical course leads to violence if and only if the outcome removes the existing controllers. politically impossible in current state of affairs. they control the venues of change. therefor violence or continue down the path to less and less freedom til the know unknown.

I think the total number of informers in East Germany comprised of about 80% of the population.
My wife escaped communist Czechoslovakia in 68, just before Dubcek's Prague Spring, and she tells me she never learned to smile. Smiling demonstrated that you were happy about something, so you had to be doing something wrong.

"One of them is that the old notions of “liberal” and “conservative” seem almost inapplicable."

This would be because they are, quite simply, puppets:

"There is no longer any diversity of opinion. Rather, this Corporate Media preaches to the Drones as a single, monolithic herd – the classic trademark of any propaganda machine – except bifurcated into two parts, to create the illusion of “choice” (and illusion of democracy).

Proof of this two-party dictatorship comes simply from observation. While the two-halves of this dictatorship (neatly) alternate between titular control, the policies never change. The foreign policy remains identical. The monetary policy remains identical. The economic policy remains identical – subject to the fact that all these policies become steadily more extreme/radicalized.

While one could write chapters about the structure and evolution of this hate-filled society, this would fail to capture one of the most-important realities of this social, political, and military monstrosity. The Fourth Reich is, itself, a Puppet Regime."

"We" aren't building anything...the Talmud's are building what they have planned to build for decades, actually centuries. The war on terror of course is "fake", so when you really get your head around that, you begin to understand just exactly how few people are leading the very small "controlling class" to implement this stuff. Now throw in the fact that the vast legions of "controllers" are white, middle class baby boomers, the most spoiled "me, me, me" brainwashed TV watchers ever known of on the face of the earth, sprinkle in some economic collapse and keep paying off those in charge of "security"...you get the idea. We know who is responsable and we either start putting them in their place of its game over.